Catcher in the Rye Siddhartha A Perfect Peace Catch-22 Breakfast of Champions A Confederacy of Dunces.
That’s a tough one as I’ve read so many books in my life. The above books didn’t impact me like they do a lot of people. Game of Thrones books 1-3 Ready Player One Daemon Three Body Problem trilogy I’ll have to think about it.
Wow. Very close to mine. I'd add, Chicot the Jester Marguerite de Valois The Beautiful and Damned Don Quixote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Not including anything already mentioned, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings would definitely be included in mine. The Bible as well. Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby, The Raven, The Count of Monte Cristo, Jurassic Park, maybe The Wheel of Time and the Timothy Zahn authored Star Wars trilogy (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command).
Walden Bleak House Great Expectations The Stranger Babbitt On Liberty Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance also, the essay "Sequences" by Patrick McManus. If you don't know it, here it is:
I am surprised no one has answered Atlas Shrugged. I have never finished it because once it starts going on about train track alloys I get so disinterested I put it back on the shelf and forget.
It's okay, but could have used a much more aggressive editor. At one point there is a monologue by John Galt that goes on for 60 pages. It also has way too much focus on Dagny Taggart and her romantic relationships. The Fountainhead is a better read.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." These kind of threads often puzzle me because of the disconnect between people's reading choices and actual politics. I'd like to think mine are well aligned and reflective of both my intellectual and lived life. Then again, I'm an idiot. Here are 10 of mine broken into categories: Novels Absalom, Absalom The Brothers Karamazov Angle of Repose History Simple Justice The Education of Henry Adams I Will Bear Witness (both volumes) Work Young Men and Fire Drift into Failure (Sidney Dekker) Environment Desert Solitaire Cadillac Desert
odd that you brought up politics in this thread, or that you'd be surprised people read books written by authors who might feel differently than they do about one or another issue.
Both books (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) have long monologues by the hero. For sure the Galt monologue is much, much longer than the courtroom speech by Roark in The Fountainhead. Rand was using those novels to define Objectivism. She was a philosopher as well as writer, so that is why it was written as it was. A strict interpretation or application of Objectivism to politics or economics doesn’t function as it did in her fictional world. That being said, she had some concerns about the future of society that frankly have come to pass. I think if you read Atlas Shrugged and then look at changes in society over the last 50 years there are a lot of parallels. I read both around the age of 15 at the recommendation of my history teacher. And at least for me, a lot of the principles that I live by and how I run, my businesses were developed on her inspiration. Ayn was a flawed person (as we all are) and both books are pretty long and excessively wordy at times but inside of all of that they are both brilliant stories.
